More Than Just a Game: Football v Apartheid

To further promote disharmony, the prison authorities tried wherever possible to mix African National Congress members with inmates who held allegiance to other organizations, such as PAC and the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO). They assumed that holding adherents of these different factions in close proximity to one another would bring out the worst in the men and that their differences would cause disunity and fractiousness in the prison population.

The men who ran the prisons were, however, accustomed to dealing with traditional criminals, and this led them to make a number of mistakes in their policies towards political prisoners. Their assumption that nothing could ever unify the men on Robben Island was one of their worst errors of judgement. The prison brought together committed political opponents of apartheid from across the country. Men who might otherwise never have met had the opportunity to discuss and debate issues and to build on one another’s experiences. They quickly found common cause in their opposition to both apartheid and the efforts of the prison to break them, and that became the first step towards finding other things that would unite and bring them together.

At eight o’clock, the prisoners were ordered to sleep, but it was freezing cold and the sparse matting that served as a mattress was unyielding and desperately uncomfortable. Lights in the cell blocks were left burning throughout the hours of darkness, and warders patrolled the corridors, often removing their shoes and tiptoeing in stocking feet so inmates wouldn’t hear their approach. Talking was banned and anyone found so much as whispering would be in for a beating.

Most of the prisoners found that the nights were the worst. Left in silence, alone with their thoughts, their minds would drift back across the unsettled waters to the mainland, to home, to their family, their wife and children. Of course they missed their loved ones and had understandable concerns about their financial and domestic well-being – whole families were left without a breadwinner, struggling to put food on the table and clothe their children – but there was also the constant and very real fear that family members were themselves in danger: of being put under surveillance by the security forces, persecuted because their father, brother, uncle, cousin, or nephew was incarcerated on Robben Island. After over a decade and a half of apartheid, by 1964, South Africa was virtually a police state. Torture and murder in police and military cells was abetted by freelance, vigilante justice carried out by members of the security forces. The families of Robben Island prisoners were particular targets.

All the inmates could do was hope – hope that comrades and friends would still be at liberty, and helping their families to survive. The prisoners had to believe this, but doubt crept in at night, ‘the enemy within’, as Nelson Mandela called it. The prisoners had all come to know what the apartheid regime was capable of, had suffered its interrogation and torture. What if a loved one were being subjected to the same treatment? Visits were restricted and letters heavily censored. With no knowledge or information about what might be happening back at home, countless nights were spent fretting. Was it morally right to commit singlemindedly to a political cause, whatever the personal sacrifice, whatever the cost to one’s family?

From day one, life for the prisoners on the island fell into a monotonous pattern. Awoken at 5.30 a.m. by the harsh clang of an iron bell, they were allowed to wash and shave in cold brackish sea water before being whipped, naked, out of their compound and subjected to the humiliation and indignity of a full body-cavity search.

For the black prisoners, each morning would start with a mad scrum, a frantic search through the pile of car-tyre sandals for a pair that might remotely fit. On Tony Suze’s first morning, he realized that the order of the day was simply quickly to grab whatever sandals you could. Perhaps they wouldn’t be a pair – one too small, another far too big, maybe two left feet; probably they would not be the right size – and prisoners would regularly spend the rest of each day trying to swap for something that did fit. The next morning, the ‘challenge’ would start all over again.

The guards justified throwing the sandals into a pile in the yard by claiming that common-law prisoners had been hiding blades and sharp objects in their footwear for night-time fights and score settling. The truth, though, lay more in the petty, infuriating lengths the authorities would go to in order to humiliate, frustrate, and punish the political prisoners. A lot of days would be spent barefoot, which, given the work that Tony and his fellow politicals were forced to do, was a painful proposition. Common-law inmates were given the less strenuous jobs, working in the kitchens, the offices, or the library. The toughest work was reserved for the political prisoners: toiling eight hours every day in the quarry.

Having been harried to finish their miserable breakfast of porridge, the prisoners were marched in columns, double-quick time, down a rough gravel road enclosed on either side by high walls of barbed wire. The track led to the east coast of the island, to Rangatira Bay. When they reached the bay, the men were corralled in a barbed-wire pen so that the warders could divide them up into work details. In the pen, prisoners were harassed, beaten randomly, and set upon by Alsatian guard dogs which snapped and chewed at their arms and legs. This was their introduction to the stone quarry, the place former prisoners refer to as ‘where everything happened, where life was really lived’.

The quarry itself was a bleak spot, cold and inhospitable. Both Sedick and Tony recalled their first sight of it. The Atlantic’s gun-powder-grey waves roiled and swelled and then crashed into the quarry, sending walls of spray flying across the grim natural bowl of rock, filling it with seawater. The men’s initial task would be to pump out this water and build dykes across the shingle beach to stop the quarry being re-flooded. For their first few weeks and months on the island, they worked in bone-chillingly cold water, hewing out and then carrying heavy boulders to the beach.

Once the quarry was cleared and sealed off from the ocean, the men were set another task: building cell blocks for themselves and the new prisoners who were being brought on to the island. The old military buildings were full to bursting point, and inmates who arrived after Tony were warehoused in iron sheds, zinktronk (zinc jail), which were freezing in winter, baking hot during the summer months. Despite their lack of concern at the poor living conditions, the prison regime had decided, with a sadistic ingenuity that would come to seem typical, not to go to the expense of employing government contractors but to force political prisoners to build their own jail – the only convicts made to do so in modern times.

The work was backbreaking. Wielding hammers weighing over 13 pounds, the men were driven hard by the warders, day in and day out. It was particularly tough for prisoners such as Sedick and Marcus Solomon, who were not used to such hard physical labour. On Marcus’s first day working in the drained quarry he had to push an iron wheelbarrow, loading and unloading rocks. By mid-morning his hands were a mass of blisters which soon began to chafe, burst, and bleed.

No medical aid was provided and prisoners were expected to carry on working at full tilt irrespective of injury or fatigue. Those who fell behind were beaten and put on short rations. It did not seem to occur to the prison regime that denying prisoners full rations would further diminish their ability to work.

Tony Suze spent his first few days on the island on a work detail cutting stones inside the quarry. He used his vantage point to try to find his school friend Benny Ntoele. The two had played football together for years, and Tony knew that Benny had been shipped out to Robben Island a month before him. He was one of Tony’s oldest friends, and finding him would be a real morale-booster – or so he thought.

A work party passed Tony’s group, and another prisoner said that Benny was part of it. Tony did not see him and the next day he asked someone to point him out. Tony peered long and hard towards where the man was indicating but couldn’t recognize his friend. His work-mate pointed again, singling out a small, crook-backed figure. Tony couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Back in Pretoria, Benny had been a chubby little guy. This man was a skeleton, drawn and aged. The two exchanged waved greetings before a guard stepped in to make Tony return to his stone cutting. The sight of Benny scared the life out of Tony. As he worked, tears trickled down his cheeks. He thought to himself, if they can do that to someone in just one month, did any of them have a hope of getting off Robben Island alive?

The sheer physical burden of working in the quarry was punctuated by acts of violence perpetrated by the warders. It did not take the prisoners long to understand the depth of their sadism. The warders patrolled the work groups in the quarry relentlessly, enforcing a strict no-talking rule with rifle butts to the head and beatings with batons and truncheons. One warder, an Afrikaner Nazi, proudly sported a swastika tattoo on one arm and was nicknamed ‘Suitcase’ Van Rensburg by the prisoners because of the case he carried around with him.

Many of the older guards shared Van Rensburg’s far-right views. During the Second World War a pro-Nazi movement called the Ossewabrandwag was formed in South Africa. By the end of the conflict it boasted 300,000 members. The party even had its own version of the Brownshirts, the Stormjaers. Many ex-members of the Ossewabrandwag went on to work in the military, the police, and the prison services.

Tony was taken aback by the venom of some of the senior guards. Warder Delport was known as the ‘terror of the quarry’. He despised the black prisoners and regarded them as vermin, a danger to the white race. Delport was determined to make their time on Robben Island a living hell. Strong and muscular, he was free with his baton and encouraged his junior guards to be the same. Prisoners in Delport’s area of the quarry quickly became used to regular beatings and assaults. Being young and naturally defiant, Tony often found himself a target.

Before he arrived, there had been a number of coloured warders on the island guarding the common-law criminals. Once the political prisoners began to arrive, however, the coloured guards were transferred back to mainland prisons and replaced with an all-white staff. The authorities feared that the coloured guards might empathize with the political prisoners or at least see them as persons, rather than as objects or numbers. Many of the new junior warders were young, poor, illiterate Afrikaner whites who were malleable, totally unquestioning supporters of apartheid. The senior guards taught them to view the political prisoners as nothing more than terrorists and communists committed to driving the white man out of Africa. The propaganda they were fed by their government stressed ‘black danger’ to both South Africa and white civilization.

Over time, the prisoners would work patiently on the attitudes of the warders, but their initial, fundamental lesson was learned swiftly. Although the Minister of Justice had overall control of the judicial system, the Department of Prisons in Pretoria set policy, and the commanding officer on Robben Island was the head of their institution, none of these mattered to the prisoners anywhere near as much as the warders in charge of individual sections and work groups. These were the men whose actions directly affected the daily lives of each and every prisoner; these were the men who could sabotage or ignore any policy established by Pretoria or the senior officers.

In the beginning battle lines between warders and prisoners were strictly drawn and the entrenched prejudices of the warders seemed intractable. Warders were positively discouraged by their officers from having ‘unnecessary communication’ with prisoners and forbidden to discuss politics or talk about any of their family members. The guards were not to grow close to the prisoners but rather to impose a regime of institutional violence and random persecution across the entire quarry. No warders embraced this more enthusiastically than the Kleyhans twins, Pieter and Ewart.

One blazing hot day in the quarry senior ANC member Johnson Mlambo questioned an order given by a guard. As he was carried away from his workplace, kicking and screaming, the Kleyhans ordered other prisoners to dig a deep hole in the grey, dusty soil. Mlambo was then buried up to his neck in the ground and left to swelter in the hot sun. A couple of hours later, Ewart Kleyhans swaggered back over to Mlambo with a group of other guards and sneeringly asked if he wanted water. Yes? Well, Kleyhans would go one better – he would give Mlambo ‘whisky’. And, with that, Kleyhans unbuttoned the flies of his trousers and urinated into the prisoner’s face.

Another inmate to fall foul of the Kleyhanses was one of the first political prisoners on Robben Island, Andrew Masondo. He complained about conditions in the quarry. Ewart dragged him away and, in a vicious rage, beat Masondo until he bled through his eyes, his mouth, and his ears. The prisoner spent a month in the sick bay and became short-sighted as a consequence of the attack.

Masondo was lucky to make it into the sick bay. Ill or injured prisoners were often abused and hit, accused of being ‘lazy blacks’. When men complained of feeling sick, guards would swing a baton at their heads. If he ducked, the prisoner was ‘obviously’ well. The other method applied to determine if a prisoner was ill or merely shamming was to order him to take a dose of castor oil. If he refused, there would be no medical examination or treatment. The authorities provided the prisoners little in the way of medical help or support, and the sick were mostly nursed back to health by fellow prisoners who happened to have had training in first aid.

In addition to beatings and threats from the guards, the men were deliberately robbed of their dignity at every possible turn. Tony soon discovered that if he wanted to relieve himself or fetch a drink of water, he had to hand over his work card and literally negotiate permission. Often, the request was refused for no reason other than malice.

The warders missed no opportunity to trick and belittle the prisoners. Early on, Marcus and his work group were gathered together and made to stand to attention in the quarry. Any man who had a driving licence was asked to put his hand up. Hoping they might get an easier, less strenuous job driving a lorry or a tractor, a number of men enthusiastically raised their arm aloft. A grinning guard pulled them out of the pack and led them to a nearby shed. It was full of wheelbarrows with rusted and bent iron wheels. ‘You can drive? Good. Then you can drive these.’

The barrows had a big heavy wheel on the front, were notoriously difficult to push and keep balanced, especially when they were full of rocks, and regularly toppled over. Whenever this happened, the prisoner responsible would immediately be beaten and the warders would scoff triumphantly, ‘You want to govern the country? You can’t even govern a wheelbarrow,’ or ‘What’s the problem? Is this wheelbarrow tired?’

At midday, the prisoners were allowed a short break for lunch, which was eaten in the quarry. Once again served up from metal drums, it was usually a slop made from maize. Sometimes, but rarely, it might contain a little meat gristle and fat, or fish scrapings. Food was allocated according to race. Blacks received 340 grams of meal each day; Asians and coloureds, 400. Officially, coloured and Asian prisoners were allowed 170 grams of fish or meat four times a week; blacks 140. In practice, though, prisoners were seldom given their ‘official’ ration. Run by the common-law inmates, the prison’s kitchens bubbled over with corruption. The cooks kept the best food aside for themselves and their gang associates or used it to bribe the guards in order to gain favours.

After the brief break for lunch, it was back to an afternoon of hard labour. The pace of work became more and more frenzied as the day progressed. Each group had a strict quota it had to satisfy and, whatever the job, each prisoner was given a daily target. If he failed to reach it, his work card was taken away from him and the prisoner placed on a ‘spare diet’ as punishment. Meagre though normal rations were, the men soon learned to fear being put on the spare diet – two days with nothing but rice water, which contained little in the way of energy, sustenance, or calories. Working in the quarry with only that in your belly was ravaging.

In his first few days on the island, Sedick found life in the quarry almost impossible. Slight in build and distinctly unathletic, he struggled desperately to meet his daily quota of broken stones. However, help was at hand, and it revealed to Sedick a growing sense of unity and selfless solidarity among the prisoners on the island. He would turn around from hewing out a rock from the quarry face to discover that the amount of stones in his pile had suddenly multiplied. The stronger, fitter men were keeping a running daily check on those who were older, weaker, or just plain ill. Wherever humanly possible, they hit their own targets and then surreptitiously helped other comrades to attain theirs.

After a day in the quarry, the exhausted men were jogged back down the barbed-wire corridor to their cell blocks, once again in double-quick time, harassed by dogs and swinging batons, harried to move faster, always faster. The routine of humiliation, however, was far from over. Back in their compound, prisoners were made to perform the most degrading of acts: the ‘tausa dance’. Naked, they were ordered to leap up into the air and click their tongues so that the guards could make sure there was nothing hidden in their mouths, then they had to twist around, clap their hands, and land with their backsides exposed so that the warders could check they weren’t smuggling anything back from the quarry between their buttocks. The political prisoners steadfastly refused to perform the tausa – and paid the consequences with further beatings and abuse. They received the same punishment for their defiance in not addressing the guards as baas or ‘master’ – terms of utter submission.

As the vast majority of the political prisoners were locked up for the night in their cramped cell blocks, a few hundred yards across the prison, Nelson Mandela, ANC leader Walter Sisulu, and a score of other imprisoned black and coloured party leaders were led back to the isolation block, having spent their day labouring in a smaller, lime quarry in the middle of the island.

The isolation section was a quadrangle of buildings separate from the rest of the prison, made up of three double rows of cells, each with a corridor running down the middle. On the fourth side of the quadrangle there stood an imposing wall just over 20 foot high, on top of which armed guards with Alsatian dogs patrolled twenty-four hours a day.

Inside the isolation block, the political leaders lived in tiny, single, seven-foot-square cells, the walls and floors of which were riddled with damp. These men were permanently segregated from the main jail, and the prison regime worked hard to ensure that they had no contact with their party lieutenants and foot soldiers. The policy proved to be unsuccessful.

Common-law prisoners who served in the isolation block as trustees could be bribed to pass messages, news, and information between the various leaders and their men. Sedick was particularly impressed with a method that had been developed by the prisoners on the island to produce ‘invisible notes’. To all intents and purposes, these appeared to be blank scraps of paper but, when exposed to heat, the note revealed orders, directives, and advice, which had been written with milk. Other prisoners perfected a system of quasi-semaphore or wrote in the sand in order to pass messages between the two areas of the prison.

The overwhelming message that came back to the main prison from the political leadership was that Robben Island must be turned into a ‘university of struggle’. The political education of the prisoners was positively encouraged, as were discussion and debating groups that would plan for a new, apartheid-free South Africa of the future.

This message reinforced the existing desire of the other prisoners to start studying, and this soon became a vital and important way of boosting morale and helping the political prisoners to create their own sense of community. Studying was not a solitary exercise; the men would teach and learn from one another. Those who threw themselves into studying provided an example for comrades who might otherwise have allowed prison to turn them into passive human beings. It served to create a sense of self-respect in the most dire of circumstances – but it also allowed the prisoners to believe that they were wresting back some degree of control over their lives in the prison.

Skilled teachers such as Sedick and Marcus directed all their energies into organizing study sessions with the other prisoners, and in so doing instantly gained a real sense of purpose. Some of their comrades were unable to read and write, so a concerted effort was made to wipe out illiteracy in the prison. Soon, in the evenings, the cell blocks were abuzz with a whole range of educational activities. The prisoners organized a variety of seminars, many of them dealing with political and economic matters. However, throughout the early years of the prison, the discussions and seminars were segregated strictly along political lines.

The men also took advantage of the prison regulations concerning educational opportunities for inmates, which enshrined the right to take approved correspondence courses at both the matric (secondary school) and university level. Essentially, this ‘right’ had been instituted as a piece of window dressing, which the apartheid regime could point to as an example of its ‘fairness’, because, in truth, only an isolated few had ever asked to exploit the opportunity. Suddenly, though, the Robben Island prison authorities were swamped with requests to take correspondence courses. Scores of prisoners signed up, half expecting the chief warder to turn them down – but they were all granted. This was an early indication to the men that strength could be found in numbers. If they were to change any of the conditions in the prison, they would have to do it together.

Yet studying and correspondence courses were not the only pastimes in the prison. Most of the prisoners were young and learned to find their fun where they could. Their ingenuity knew no bounds. They made dice from stolen pieces of soap, playing cards from scraps of paper, and chess pieces from lumps of driftwood salvaged from the shingle beach next to the quarry. Men from the Eastern Cape such as Marcus showed their fellow inmates how to play draughts, while inmates from the Transvaal introduced the game of ludo.

The prisoners did not expect the authorities to tolerate any of this. The regime did not want prisoners to enjoy a single moment on Robben Island; they were to have their spirits broken at every possible turn. Any attempt the inmates made to alleviate the tedium of the prison routine was cruelly stamped on. Regular searches were carried out and cells shaken down. The guards took sadistic joy in breaking up players’ games, and anything that the prisoners had created out of debris or for their own pleasure was immediately destroyed.

A cellmate of Tony’s had spent countless hours carving a pattern on to a prison-issue spoon. During a search, one guard shook the man’s bedding and the spoon fell on to the concrete floor. The warder picked it up, rolled it around and around in his hand and, clearly admiring the delicate and intricate carving, smiled, snapped it into little pieces, and then cast the pieces to the floor. Other prisoners suffered the same fate when they were discovered to have found ways to manufacture personal items from driftwood and pieces of slate.

There was only one game it proved virtually impossible to stop. It was simple to set up and easy to hide from the warders. Football-mad Tony Suze had only been on the island a short time when he and fellow fans of the game got the idea to bundle up and bind together a couple of the men’s shirts to create a makeshift football. If the guards came to search the cells, it could be quickly pulled apart.

Soon, the long, dull evenings were enlivened by enthusiastic cell games. Bedding was pushed to the sides and short five- and eight-a-side mini matches took place, one prisoner acting as look-out.

As time went on and more and more football players of a high standard came on to the island, the more passionate these matches became but still, in 1964, it was all completely ad hoc. In those early days, when Sedick, Tony, Lizo, and Marcus were on the island, it seemed utterly inconceivable that the regime would allow the prisoners to play organized sport – but it would not be too long before the men who had been brought together from across South Africa to serve their sentences on Robben Island would dare to dream.

3 The Struggle for Prisoners’ Rights (#ulink_7410bf3d-d14c-5215-8129-8ddb77b53ada)

‘Sport was a human right. We prisoners had the right to spiritual and physical development.’ Isaac Mthimunye, Prisoner 898/63

For decades, football had been by far the most popular national game in non-white South Africa. Throughout the Twenties and Thirties an extensive web of black and coloured leagues had sprung up around the country and, as more blacks moved into the urban areas during the Thirties and Forties, a number of now-legendary clubs were born – the Orlando Pirates, the Mokone Swallows, and the Bucks among them. The players, though largely unpaid, became superstars and role models in their own neighbour-hoods, achieving on the pitch and bringing joy and self-respect to their communities off it.

By the Fifties, unlike white South African football supporters, black fans could also bask in the reflected glory of having their own world-famous football star – the legendary Steve ‘Kalamazoo’ Mokone. Though he had to leave the totally segregated South African leagues to make his name, and wait months for his international passport to be granted, Steve Mokone was an inspiration, even to black South Africans who had little interest in sport.

Mokone was already a national star playing for the Bucks club when scouts from England’s Coventry City Football Club persuaded him to play in Britain in 1955. Though he thrived on the pitch, he became disillusioned by the racism of English fans. Non-white faces were rare in British sport at that time, and the abuse heaped upon Mokone during matches by both players and fans was relentless.